and sky turn a fiery orange as Marion blows out her candles, and we gorge on rich chocolate mud cake, topped with raspberry gelato.
Then Jeff starts playing DJ. He has an uncanny ability to choose just the right songs to stir each one of his boomer-generation parents and aunts into dancing mode. He puts on the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman.” My oldest sister, Marilyn, jumps up, grabs Russ’s hand, and they dance into the middle of the floor. Jiving together for as many years as Jeff can remember, they whirl and twirl, duck under each other’s arms, in synch with every step.
Reared on a continuous soundtrack of Van (“He’s my man!”) Morrison, Jeff knows how to get his mother up. “G-L-O-R-I-A!” Marion struts onto the floor, her lips in a puckered pout, head bobbing backward and forward; one hand on her hip, the other pointing and wagging—a dead-on imitation of Mick Jagger. We bellow along, harking back to our teenage dances at the Oromocto boat club, stomping and sweating to Don Corey’s band—“gotta shout about it.… Gloria!”
Then DJ Jeff plays the “golden voice” that will pull the youngest sister up onto the floor.
Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
and the band is really happening
and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high …
I leap up to join the circle of dancers. As Cohen’s monotonal voice sings about women tearing their blouses off and mendancing on the polka dots, I lift my orange tank top up over my head, throw it onto the floor, stripped down to my hot pink lululemon bra. Jeff doubles over in laughter; his face and shaven head glowing in the candlelight. Sylvie on one side of him and Mica on the other, they raise their Scotch glasses to the dancers … dancing into memory
—busted in the blinding lights of Closing Time, Closing Time, Closing Time
.
He leaves quietly at four the next morning to fly back to CFB Shilo. It will be three months later, in mid-November—after the birth of his son—that we will have our have our suspicions confirmed. He is in training for deployment to Afghanistan in February 2007.
So it is here at the cottage on Grand Lake, a couple of weeks after his death, that I have my dream about Jeff—the first one anyone in our family has had about him since he died. We have all been waiting and watching for a sign, desperate to feel his continued existence in some form. I awake mystified by the mysterious imagery, reluctant to talk about the dream when I first get up. But as Marion and I sit with our coffee in the early morning sunshine, watching two loons dive and re-emerge in the glassy lake, I describe it to her:
Jeff is standing on a high cliff. He wears a kilt, knee socks, a billowing white shirt. He waves his arms in the graceful fluid motions of some martial art, like t’ai chi. And he is smiling
.
“It was such a peaceful image,” I say. Marion looks at me, astounded, then recounts the similar Highland warriordreams Jeff related as a teenager—the same age as his grandfathers when they enlisted in the Second World War; the age of St. Martin when he experienced the vision that changed the course of his life.
As Jeff was moving from childhood into adulthood, was he tapping into the buried self within? Freudians believe that dreams manifest our repressed desires. Jung interpreted them as symbolic representations of the dreamer’s unconscious. Dreams during puberty until age twenty are especially significant, he said, particularly ones that show no relation to the dreamer’s conscious situation. “Called ‘great dreams’ by the primitives,” Jung writes in
Children’s Dreams
, “they are like an oracle, ‘somnia a deo missa’—
Dreams sent by God.”
Jeff’s dream connected him to his ancestral past and, at the same time, presaged his warrior destiny. It foretold ambitions that would take him another decade to consciously embrace. “The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself,” writes Joseph
Then Jeff starts playing DJ. He has an uncanny ability to choose just the right songs to stir each one of his boomer-generation parents and aunts into dancing mode. He puts on the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman.” My oldest sister, Marilyn, jumps up, grabs Russ’s hand, and they dance into the middle of the floor. Jiving together for as many years as Jeff can remember, they whirl and twirl, duck under each other’s arms, in synch with every step.
Reared on a continuous soundtrack of Van (“He’s my man!”) Morrison, Jeff knows how to get his mother up. “G-L-O-R-I-A!” Marion struts onto the floor, her lips in a puckered pout, head bobbing backward and forward; one hand on her hip, the other pointing and wagging—a dead-on imitation of Mick Jagger. We bellow along, harking back to our teenage dances at the Oromocto boat club, stomping and sweating to Don Corey’s band—“gotta shout about it.… Gloria!”
Then DJ Jeff plays the “golden voice” that will pull the youngest sister up onto the floor.
Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
and the band is really happening
and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high …
I leap up to join the circle of dancers. As Cohen’s monotonal voice sings about women tearing their blouses off and mendancing on the polka dots, I lift my orange tank top up over my head, throw it onto the floor, stripped down to my hot pink lululemon bra. Jeff doubles over in laughter; his face and shaven head glowing in the candlelight. Sylvie on one side of him and Mica on the other, they raise their Scotch glasses to the dancers … dancing into memory
—busted in the blinding lights of Closing Time, Closing Time, Closing Time
.
He leaves quietly at four the next morning to fly back to CFB Shilo. It will be three months later, in mid-November—after the birth of his son—that we will have our have our suspicions confirmed. He is in training for deployment to Afghanistan in February 2007.
So it is here at the cottage on Grand Lake, a couple of weeks after his death, that I have my dream about Jeff—the first one anyone in our family has had about him since he died. We have all been waiting and watching for a sign, desperate to feel his continued existence in some form. I awake mystified by the mysterious imagery, reluctant to talk about the dream when I first get up. But as Marion and I sit with our coffee in the early morning sunshine, watching two loons dive and re-emerge in the glassy lake, I describe it to her:
Jeff is standing on a high cliff. He wears a kilt, knee socks, a billowing white shirt. He waves his arms in the graceful fluid motions of some martial art, like t’ai chi. And he is smiling
.
“It was such a peaceful image,” I say. Marion looks at me, astounded, then recounts the similar Highland warriordreams Jeff related as a teenager—the same age as his grandfathers when they enlisted in the Second World War; the age of St. Martin when he experienced the vision that changed the course of his life.
As Jeff was moving from childhood into adulthood, was he tapping into the buried self within? Freudians believe that dreams manifest our repressed desires. Jung interpreted them as symbolic representations of the dreamer’s unconscious. Dreams during puberty until age twenty are especially significant, he said, particularly ones that show no relation to the dreamer’s conscious situation. “Called ‘great dreams’ by the primitives,” Jung writes in
Children’s Dreams
, “they are like an oracle, ‘somnia a deo missa’—
Dreams sent by God.”
Jeff’s dream connected him to his ancestral past and, at the same time, presaged his warrior destiny. It foretold ambitions that would take him another decade to consciously embrace. “The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself,” writes Joseph
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